The present invention generally relates to power distribution management, and more specifically, to a method, system, and apparatus for managing connection relationship between a power distribution unit outlet and a device.
An intelligent power distribution unit (PDU) offers enhanced power distribution and monitoring capabilities, especially for those sensitive electronic and electrical applications. The intelligent PDU is widely used to distribute power to multiple devices (for example, a server) according to a predetermined scheduling plan based on a power policy. Specifically, common intelligent PDUs at present generally have more than one outlet or socket to power multiple devices. At this point, effectively managing the PDU outlets is of importance to control and monitor the overall power distribution of the PDUs. Specifically, monitoring PDU outlets comprises: turning on and/or off any given outlet of the PDU on demand, effectively managing the power consumption of these PDU outlets, and the like. To this end, it is required to determine the connection relationship between each PDU outlet and an external device (i.e., the powered device), i.e., determine which outlet is connected to which external device.
A most simple and straightforward method for determining the connection relationship between a PDU outlet and the external device is manual operation. However, it would be appreciated that a middle-scale or large-scale data center generally has thousands of devices. Once a device is decoupled from the PDU outlet and connected to a new one, the administrator has to manually track and record this change and update information accordingly in a management system. If the administrator forgets to do so due to negligence, the management of all PDU outlets might be in a chaos, which causes potential risks of misoperation (for example, incorrectly power on/off the device). Further, it is appreciate that such solution requires remarkable labor cost.
In order to improve the PDU outlet management, some automatic or semi-automatic solutions for determining and managing connection relationship have been proposed. For example, a topologic diagram between PDU outlets and external devices can be constructed, and a candidate PDU outlet for each external device is identification using a heuristic algorithm. However, the heuristic algorithm cannot guarantee accurate determination and management of the connection relationship of each PDU outlet. For another example, it has been proposed to provide the information device with an associated RFID (radio frequency identification device) transmitter and provide the PDU outlet with a RFID reader to read the RFID of the external device connected thereto. In this way, the connection relationship between the device and the PDU outlet may be established based on the device RFID read by the outlet. A drawback of such solution is the expensive cost. It is also time-consuming and troublesome to provide a RFID transmitter and reader to the external device and PDU outlet, respectively. Moreover, those devices that have been already deployed have to be modified significantly.